1) On the intrinsic human urge to travel The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, the bear…
By Larry Habegger (an excerpt) The best travel stories are really stories about life, with lessons for the writer and reader about ourselves and the people and places in our still magical world. We don’t have to travel far to explore both the outer and inner worlds. Some of us love to roam the world,…
1) The better the villain, the better the hero The better the villain, the better the hero. The better the villain, the better the plot, because the villain is the one who’s usually driving the plot. I was very, very, very lucky to inherit [Hannibal Lecter]. I could not invent him to save my life.…
This is the kit Amanjano uses to make Mentawao tribal tattoos, of the sort he (and shaman like him) wears all over his body. The top item is a palm-wood hammer that is used to tap the wood-mounted nail (note lower item) when injecting tribal ink under the skin. Tattoos are one of the first…
My second host in the Siberut Island rainforest was Amanjano, a 62-year-old shaman who lived on a scenic bend of stream deep in the jungle. Amanjano proved to be more laid-back and happy-go-lucky than Amantiru, my first host – in part, I’m sure, because of his nature, but also because of his age. Whereas Amantiru…
This is my send-off after a multi-night stay at Amantiru and Baitiru’s place in the Siberut Island rainforest. It was interesting how quickly I became used to the rhythms of jungle life. I recall thinking, upon first hiking up into Amantiru’s house, “Dude, that guy is wearing a loincloth.” A couple days later, having gotten…
The social atmosphere on Siberut Island was very much geared toward evening gatherings. It took me a while get used to it, since even before the web-wired “information age” I grew up surrounded by popular culture like TV – and Amantiru’s place didn’t even have a radio. Indeed, the songs Amantiru and his friends sang…
After the teacher asked if anyone had a sacred place and the students fidgeted and shrank in their chairs, the most serious of them all said it was his car, being in it alone, his tape deck playing things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth had been spoken and began speaking about their rooms,…
My trekking guide, Agus, told me the story of some Dutch journalists who wanted to visit an “authentic” Siberut Island village, and were disappointed that the Mentawai they saw within a day of the Baderaeket River used plastic cups and ate processed sugar. Insisting that Agus take them deeper into the jungle for a purer…
Amantiru, my Mentawai host on Siberut Island, processed sago flour using a technique not dissimilar to traditional wine-makers’ ritual of stomping grapes. He jokingly called it “dancing without music.” Whereas the world’s most iconic staple foods are rice (commonly associated with Asia), wheat (Europe and the Middle East), and maize (the Americas), the Mentawai diet…
One of the more startling features of Mentawai houses are the animal skulls that hang over the lintel of each family home. Some of these bones once belonged to wild pigs, others to flying foxes. Most unnerving to behold are the bones of “simpai,” the black-and-yellow primate endemic to the islands, which yield faintly human-like…
